Mariah Carey Was Spat on in Racist Attack as a Child

The '#Beautiful' singer says during a press conference of 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel that she has experienced some incidents because of racism.

Photo credit: Ivan Nikolov/WENN

A scene of "Lee Daniels' The Butler" evokes a painful memory of a racist incident which Mariah Carey experienced when she was a child. The singer, whose parents are Irish American and African American/Venezuelan, said during the movie's press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Monday, August 6, that she was spat on when she sat in a school bus.

"That actually happened to me," the 43-year-old singer told the crowd, referring to a scene in the movie in which a black student was spat on by a white woman. "I know people would be in shock and not really want to believe or accept that, but it did. That right there, that was almost the deepest thing to me in the movie because I know what she went through - and it happened to be a bus as well. It was a school bus," she explained, as quoted by Yahoo! Movies.

Oprah Winfrey, who was also present at the event, chimed in, "Where somebody spit on you?" Carey replied, "Yeah. In the face and in the same way."

Carey has spoken up about being a biracial kid several times. The Hattie Pearl depicter once said that her mother Patricia's family disowned her because she married a man from different race in 1960.

She added during an appearance on Oprah's show, "One of the first memories I have is when I was in kindergarten or nursery school they asked us to draw a picture of our family and so I was drawing everybody and I got to my father and I started to make him brown."

"And, they were like, the kindergarten teachers are often young, and the two women were standing behind me giggling. And I turned around, self-conscious, and asked, 'Why are your laughing?' And they said, 'You're doing that wrong. Why are you making your father the wrong color?' And I said, 'No, that's the color that he is.' They made me feel like something was wrong with me, that it was a bizarre freakish thing," the mother of two concluded.